In many restaurants, especially so-called “fast food” style restaurants, various food items may be cooked in advance of being ordered by a customer and then held in a warm condition until being served to a customer. This mode of operation by restaurants is intended to enable the time lapse between receiving a customer order and service of food to the customer to be reduced as much as possible. A disadvantage, however, is that after being cooked, the edible quality of food items will start to degrade after only a brief period of time. Hence, it is not uncommon for restaurants to have to discard precooked food items after a period of time if not ordered by customers. It therefore is critical for a restaurant to carefully and accurately predict customer demands for precooked food in order to maintain an acceptable level of food quality and to minimize unrecovered costs of food that must be discarded. For example, bread items such as biscuits may tend to degrade in quality after being held for about 15 minutes. French fries may have a similarly short holding time. Chicken nuggets generally cannot be held for more than 30 minutes. Accordingly, restaurants continually strive to find ways to extend the time period over which such staple precooked food items can be held without an unacceptable loss of edible quality.